A Legacy of Activism: Remembering the Photographer Michele Singer Reiner
As her husband, Rob Reiner, grabs most of the headlines following the couple’s shocking murder, we remember Michele Singer Reiner’s creative and philanthropic work.
The story we’ve heard most about the photographer Michele Singer Reiner since the announcement of the deaths of her and her husband, the film director and actor Rob Reiner, is about how she changed the course of movie history. The couple met, the story goes, on the set of “When Harry Met Sally.”
At the time, Reiner was in his early 40s, single, with a messy romantic history. The planned ending of “When Harry Met Sally” reflected that: The protagonists were supposed to have one last conversation, then walk away. Enter, Singer Reiner.
“Originally, Harry and Sally didn’t get together,” Reiner told the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman. “But then I met Michele and I thought: ‘OK, I see how this works.’ Harry and Sally had to marry each other, too.”
It’s a romantic story—but it reduces Singer Reiner to a muse or a plot device: part of a sweet couple; a meetcute. Reiner himself said, in the 2021 episode of the podcast Double Date featuring the couple, that his wife was anything but sweet. “She’s an irate citizen,” he said, referring to her activism.
Singer Reiner, by her own admission, had a difficult start in life: her mother, a survivor of Auschwitz, was “not a good role model,” she says on the same podcast. Her parents’ was “not a good marriage.”
But she found success in photography. She took the now-iconic image of Donald Trump that graced his 1983 book “The Art of The Deal.” Not many photographers have managed to persuade Trump to look approachable—but in this picture, he smiles easily into the camera.
Singer Reiner worked on the 1990 horror movie “Misery” as a special photographer, and as a photographer on the game “MysteryDisc.” Later, she worked as a producer on the movies “Shock and Awe” in 2017, “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” in 2023, “God & Country,” a documentary about Christian nationalism, and finally, this year, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
But it was in her activism that her inner “irate citizen” came out. Reiner himself is often credited with co-founding the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) in 2009, which bankrolled the early federal constitutional challenges to Proposition 8 and Virginia’s Marriage Amendment, paving the way for same-sex marriage to be decriminalized in the U.S. He is also often credited with leading a drive to pass an early childhood development initiative in California.
But, explained Reiner on the podcast, his wife was often the driving force behind the couple’s activism. “There’s just too much injustice in the world, and she wants to fix it all,” he said.
